GSoD 2022 – STE||AR Group announces technical writer hire!

Documentation is a love letter that your write to your future self.

Damian Conway

We are proud to welcome Bhumit Attarde to STE||AR Group as the new technical writer that will work with us during this year’s Google Season of Docs period. Bhumit will focus on developing additional content for our HPX documentation in order to aid prospective users to navigate easier through our codebase. We are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration that will benefit our open source community and enrich our impact in the world of High Performance Computing.

HPX’s Season of Docs 2021

By Rachitt Shah

HPX was recently selected to be part of Google’s Season of Docs (GSoD), a program designed to improve the documentation of open source software, as well as being a Google Summer of Code organization.

GSoD aims to cover and create the documentation gaps faced by organizations due to various reasons, alongside giving technical writers who initially just wanted to know how much do editors make an avenue to showcase their skills.

I will be helping in the organization and update of the prior documentation to make it into a more navigable and to provide a user-friendly structure, which many users have had issues with using the current documentation. I will work closely with the HPX team and our users to collect feedback, find user pain-points, and improve preexisting docs, which mainly comprise of the build instructions.

Alongside, I would create a “design document” containing guidelines for how to add new content to the documentation: tips on how to structure new sections, general guidelines on what sort of content should be presented in what chapters, etc. The project may also include content rearrangement and a change of hierarchy, if the users find it is needed. 

I am currently working on a timeline and action items and researching about the possible shift to another documentation platform.

I am reachable at rachitt01@gmail.com or on the IRC as rachitt_shah, please contact me to suggest changes to the documentation or to provide feedback. We can always benefit from your ideas.

About me, I’m an undergrad studying electronics as my major, and I’m a casual sport programmer as well. I’ve been a product manager and venture capital intern in the past, and done Google Summer of Code with OpenAstronomy.

HPX accepted for Google Season of Docs 2021

This year Google is organizing the 3rd annual Google Season of Docs (GSoD). Like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) the program aims to match motivated people with interesting open source projects that are looking for volunteer contributions. GSoD, however, aims to improve open source project documentation, which often tends to get less attention than the code itself. We recognize this all too well in the HPX project. For this reason, we decided to apply for GSoD and can now proudly announce that HPX is one of 30 organizations selected to participate in this year’s GSoD!

This means that we are now looking for motivated people to help us improve our documentation. If you have some prior experience with technical writing, and are interested in working together with us on making the documentation of a cutting-edge open source C++ library the best possible guide for new and experienced users, this is your chance. You can read more about the program on the official GSoD home page. The project proposal that writers would work on can be found here. Writers are welcome to adapt aspects of the project to their specific interests. Our current documentation can be found here.

The deadline for technical writer applications is May 11 anywhere on earth. Apply here! Come talk to us about your ideas and your application on our mailing list, IRC, or Slack. We’d love to hear from you!

GSoD Final Report

By Rebecca Stobaugh.

We’ve reached the end of Google’s Season of Docs, and we’ve accomplished a lot in the past three months. My initial proposal was to work on three sections of the manual, and we have far exceeded our goal, managing to make changes to twelve different sections of the documentation. The majority of the work I’ve done has consisted of cleaning up grammatical errors and improving sentence structure. I have also added a style guide to the wiki, which should help standardize future changes to the documentation. The style guide can be found in the “HPX Source Code Structure and Coding Standards” wiki document under the section “Documentation Style Guide”. For a complete list of my pull requests during Season of Docs, please see here. To view my changes to the wiki, please see here.

Announcing HPX’s Season of Docs

By Rebecca Stobaugh

HPX was recently selected to be part of Google’s Season of Docs (GSoD), a program designed to improve the documentation of open source software. While the STE||AR Group has created extensive documentation for HPX, this documentation has been written by several different people, which has led to some inconsistencies and awkward organization. I am a technical writer and English PhD student who has been selected to edit and streamline HPX’s documentation. My goal is to clean up the content, concentrating on both grammatical issues and design concerns, to create a more cohesive, user-friendly product. My primary focus will be on two sections of the STE||AR Group’s instruction manual: “HPX Build System” and “Launching and Configuring HPX Applications.” If time allows, I will also revise the “Why HPX” page, with an emphasis on condensing and trimming repetitive content.

You can read my GSoD proposal here.